RESEARCH · OUR DATA
What our own outreach taught us.
Before Expanza worked with hotels, it spent months emailing agencies. What actually got a reply?
What we did
Between March and June 2026, Expanza contacted about 161 prospects, mostly recruitment and marketing agencies, by cold email 1. Seventeen emails bounced. About seven people replied, and two conversations turned into real sales discussions.
What didn’t work
One day in April we sent 47 first emails that looked much the same, and got one reply: a polite no 1. Almost none of them asked the reader a direct question.
Follow-up was patchy. 86 of the 161 prospects only ever received one message 1. One person who did reply with interest did so after a second email, six weeks later.
What did
The email that led to a paid project asked a genuine question about how the other business won its own clients. It got a same-day call 1. Research helped when it found a real business tension; reciting facts about the company didn’t.
What this means for a business
- One real question beats a paragraph of claims.
- Plan the follow-up before sending the first email, or it won’t happen.
- Record what happened to every approach, or you can’t learn from it.
What we don’t know
- Whether the same patterns hold for venues and their corporate customers. We’re measuring that now.
Sources
- Fact Expanza’s own sent-email records, March to June 2026 (analysed 28 Sept 2026) · Our own data, no names published